RESOURCES REQUIRED FOR SUCCESS

   Reading all the posts regularly or as and when you find time is not the way to achieve mastery in Excel.

  The best way is to practice regularly. This you can do, only if you are able to work on a computer on a daily basis, at-least one hour per day. Either find ways to learn as you work, on the job. This would be the best way. Otherwise, if possible find some after office timings which you can use for your Excel practice.

  Other alternative is practice in a browsing centre. The per hour rate is quite reasonable. Identify a computer on which MS Excel is installed.

  MS Excel has many recent versions. MS Excel,2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. The more recent version you can get, more advanced options you will be able to practice. As a beginner, MS Excel, 2007 or 2010 is good enough.

  Commit at least 300 hours of dedicated practice hours, to gain control and feel comfortable. 

   If you can have a friend or colleague who is willing to learn along with you, it will be a definite  advantage. Learning as a team, would be great fun and make learning easy and faster.

PRACTICE OF BASIC COMMANDS - 1

                                    CHANGE OF FONT, SIZE AND FONT OR CELL COLOUR

Let us work on some Excel tables to practice some basic commands. We shall make a beginning with an Excel table, Students.xls . Copy the link given below and paste it in a new web page.Take a look at the table.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7DSfACzHxhCME05b2kwU1ZJT1U

You may download this file and save it on your computer. When you open it, you will see a list of students with column names like roll no, name,gender, section, date of birth and place. Details about each student is entered, one row below the other. Each row is called a record.

We shall try out some commands using this file. If you want to keep a copy of this file,  then save it with a different name and work with the copy.

1. First we shall try to change the size of the letters on the work sheet. Select the cell containing data. To do this, first place the cursor at the top left corner. This is cell A1. Next press Ctrl+End. See image -1, below where the font tag is visible.

If you have any  doubt and require clarification mail to : itooexcel@gmail.com

You will see the window with 11 and a down arrow beside it. Click on the down arrow. You see a list of numbers. Clicking on any number will set the size of the letters in your table. The font size of the letters will change.

2. Again, look at the small window where you see the word "Calibri". Beside this there is a small downward arrow. Clicking on this you see different font names. Select one of them,by clicking on it, the font style in your table will change.

To go back to the previous letter size or style  press Ctrl+z.  This is called undo command. To get back what you did, press Ctrl+y. This is redo command.

3. To change the colour of the font, in the above image you will see the letter "A" with a small colour band below it. Clicking on this colour band will show a range of colours. Which ever colour you click on, that colour will be set for the characters in the table.

4. Similarly you can try to change the cell colour by clicking on the yellow band below the paint bucket and selecting any desired colour.

To save the changes press Ctrl+s. To gain confidence, repeat the above commands as many times as you want until you are comfortable with it. Just play around. That is the best way to learn.

If you have any doubt and need clarification mail to :  itooexcel@gmail.com